


What Would I Do?

by clickingkeyboards



Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Sorry Flo, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28936608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: Felix Mountfitchet was dead, and Lucy could not measure her devastation.In the graveyard after the funeral, she mourns.(Flo told me to not write Lucy's response to Felix's death in my previous fic, and I took that to mean 'write Lucy's response to Felix's death in my previous fic)
Relationships: Bertie Wells & Lucy Mountfitchet, Daisy Wells & Lucy Mountfitchet, Felix Mountfitchet/Lucy Mountfitchet
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	What Would I Do?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunshinedflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinedflower/gifts).



Everybody was wearing black except Lucy, who wore blue.

The funeral was a quiet affair, against the wishes of everybody that they knew. Felix would have loved the grander and the fanfare, but he would have to make to do with a small funeral until it was safe to share his identity.

It was bitter, really, that all he was to the word was an identity, a mysterious letter, a figure to tell stories about. He was only Felix, a man who lived and laughed and loved, to a precious few people. Not many people knew him for his personal vices and virtues, how he would snap harshly and apologise sincerely, how he could trip over air but dance like a professional, how he would glare at his niece for giggling only to burst out laughing a moment later.

“Aunt Lucy?”

Daisy. The young woman — for she was a young woman now, the same age Lucy had been when she met Felix — was wearing smart black and a set expression, careful to guard against emotion. She grieved in a peculiar way, quite unlike anybody else.

“Yes, Daisy?” she replied with an effort, coming back to herself with a heaving breath and blinking back into the biting and real chill of the graveyard. 

There was a weighted pause. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know, Daisy,” she replied, and her voice came out as if she had crumpled her words to pieces from swallowing so many tears. “I don’t know.”

She could feel Daisy’s isolated presence beside her, wrapped in a blanket of her own peculiarities that Lucy was not permitted to pass through to comfort her. It was almost an effort to not reach out and place a guiding hand on her arm, as if she was her brother. Since Bertie had arrived back, they had all been instinctively reaching out to assist him, even though Harold was at his side almost every moment of the day.

It hurt to see. 

What  _ would _ she do, she wondered, without her closest friend?

There would be nobody to blame her silly bad habits on, nobody to dance around the kitchen with when neither of them could sleep, nobody to sweep off her hat and kiss her senseless whenever they had been apart.

“All men get what they deserve,” Felix would tell Hazel when she was struggling with the sheer unfairness of a particular case.

Then who on earth threw this curve? Who decided to hurt the two most important men in her life, throw a shell at one and push another into the ground? Who allowed whatever controlled it all to scar Bertie’s face and stop Felix’s heart?

She was sure that, soon enough, she would remember his faults with something like fondness, how he folded book pages and never wore matching socks, how he always pulled the door shut with the knocker and left it askew, and his obscure filing system that only made sense to him. Until then, she would sit and wait, willing for him to come back and use up all the time in the world that they should have been granted. She would plead for him to explain every small habit in detail, everything that she had taken for granted and would hear the stories behind when they were seventy and had finally run out of conversation topics.

Nobody had asked for the counsel of whoever chose to do such horrific things to her husband, and yet they had given their counsel and more.

“How is your brother doing, Daisy?” she asked, her words unsteady. It was as if each syllable’s movement was tracked through her uncertainty and played back when she spoke, and she hated her words echoing her emotions so plainly.

“Uncle Felix would tell you that you should think about yourself.” Daisy paused. She was impossible to decipher. Lucy has begun thinking of it as if Daisy had been hollowed out and was slowly being filled up with the grief of other people, given no chance to develop her own response. “Sorry. He says that he doesn’t know what’s shellshock and what’s grief anymore. They’ve all mixed together.”

In unison, they turned their heads to look at Bertie and Harold, situated on a bench and speckled with the sun of the early Spring. The shrapnel had effected Bertie’s breathing and they all knew it, but it hadn’t struck them properly until they first saw Harold struggling to help him get an oxygen mask over his mouth and guiding him through gasping breaths. That was what he was doing then, helping Bertie steady his breaths and rewarding him with a gentle kiss to his scarred cheek, and another to his lips.

They looked away from the intimate moment, Daisy catching Lucy’s eye in the process. There was a look there that Daisy had never seen before, a sort of sadness full up with something else entirely. 

Perhaps she was bursting at the seams with what she wished she had said.

As an apology for accidentally looking into Lucy’s eyes — Daisy did not like eye contact — Daisy said, “Yesterday, you said that I am collecting everybody else’s grief. I think that you’re right. I can... I can see everybody’s grief, feel it pooling up inside me and saturating me through to my skin. Hazel’s grief... it’s white, and bright, and it burns everywhere. Bertie’s is a sort of black sludgy feeling, it’s heavy and it pools in my shoes.”

“And mine?” Lucy asked tentatively.

Daisy looked away. “It’s blue.” She poked the headstone with her foot. “Grief is so tiring, Aunt Lucy. I feel like a child.”

“You are one, Daisy dear.”

There was a pause as she thought about it. “Am I still your niece now Uncle Felix is dead?” she asked abruptly, looking up at her with wide blue eyes. “Or will you go away and stop caring? What are you supposed to do?”

Lucy felt herself thaw the slightest bit. “Nothing could stop me being your aunt, Daisy.”

“Why are you wearing blue?”

A slightly sardonic smile crossed Lucy’s face as she realised what was going on. “Wait until after the burial to assault Aunt Lucy with questions,” she had overheard Bertie warn. Dear Daisy, in her quest to be kind and fair and just and understanding, was following his instructions to the letter.

“Felix got me this coat. He paid obsessive attention to all the coats I already own and made a judgement from that, and I adore it.”

Daisy did not smile. “He really was horribly romantic, wasn’t he?”

There was a long silence, which Daisy did not do well with. After several long minutes of shifting uncomfortably shifting beside Lucy, she said, “I’m going to go to Hazel now.”

“Run along, Daisy dear,” she murmured. 

With a strange expression, Daisy regarded her aunt for a moment. “I wish that he wasn’t gone.”

Then she was gone too, off across the graveyard towards Hazel Wong, who ran into her arms with a sigh of relief. The two of them were matching, albeit by accident, and Lucy felt alone and cold in blue. Her eyes found Bertie again, drooping against Harold with heavy breaths, his lover’s hand moving in soothing circles over his back. It didn’t seem fair, their connection bypassing even the impenetrable shields of shellshock.

The world had seemed to sway without Felix at her side, leaving her void of shock when she found herself walking towards the pair as if Felix had taken her by her arm and led her over himself. “Bertie,” she called out softly.

He turned to look at her. “Oh. Um…” Exchanging a look with Harold, he tilted his head almost imperceptibly away from the bench that they were sat on. With a nod, Harold used Bertie’s arm as an aid to get to his feet and kissed the other man’s cheek before limping painfully away to join his brother and Alexander, who were talking quietly a little way away from the girls, by the gates of the graveyard.

He limped in a way that was impossible to ignore, in desperate need of a cane. Lucy sometimes forgot that Harold had not escaped the war without trauma either, injuries that seemed to pale in comparison to Bertie’s monstrous scars. How cruel of her, she thought, to be so distracted that she forgot that Harold Mukherjee walked on a false leg and was tortured by a veteran’s phantom pains.

“Is Harold’s leg troubling him?” she asked Bertie, sitting down on Bertie’s right. 

Nodding, Bertie said, “His prosthetic doesn’t fit him right. It’s army-issue, so you can’t expect much.”

“No, you can’t.” Lucy understood Daisy’s descriptions all of a sudden, how Bertie’s grief was a heavy and dark feeling. “He is good to you, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” There was a weight to Bertie’s words, one that Lucy knew resided in her own. “He is… wonderful.”

“I’m glad.”

Bertie placed a hand on Lucy’s shoulder, as if comforting a grieved friend as they hid away from German fire. “I’m sorry, Aunt Lucy.”

She nodded slowly. “I know.”

Carefully, he moved his hand from her shoulder and instead used it to take her hand, where it was resting in her lap. “Do you… do you know if he saw evidence of my injuries, before he died?”

“Daisy hasn’t explained what is written in her letters to him, they’re only for her eyes. But Felix’s… associate said that he saw a photo Daisy enclosed of you and Harold in a letter,” Lucy explained slowly. She had seen the photo herself, placed into her gloved hands by the same man who Felix had died in the arms of. It was burnt around the edges and had a bloody fingerprint on the edge, but Bertie and Harold looked happy enough. “He saw it.”

“Good.”

Bertie’s hand in her own made her terribly aware all of a sudden that he was not suffering the typical veteran tremor in his hand. He had been spared that, at least.

“I know,” he said in a low voice, a smile on his face. “It’s a blessing to not have a tremor, even though my left hand is barely working at all. Harold’s hands shake horribly. It’s damn not right, forcing a CO like him to go to war.”

They sat in silence for a moment, Bertie’s fingertips against the lace of her gloves, still-scarring skin brushing the patterns. She noticed Harold glancing over every few seconds, away from his brother and Alexander murmuring in practised low voices, keeping an eye on Bertie. As irrational as it was, Lucy would put herself in Bertie’s position a hundred times over, if only she could have Felix back at her side in the way that Bertie had Harold. The stab of jealousy was marred with a retching guilt, knowing that Harold only kept such a close watch in order to check that Bertie was  _ still breathing _ .

Lucy couldn’t say how long had passed, but she knew that the moment ended when Bertie’s breaths began to come in wheezes and starts, and she found herself on her feet, calling for Harold’s help.

He rushed over with panic in his voice, hands shaking as he helped Bertie force the breathing aid over his mouth and whispering encouraging things until he could breathe without assistance again. “There. There, it’s okay, don’t worry about my hands. Come on…”

“I’ll go,” she said with as much force as she could muster, and Harold gave her a puzzled look.

“If you’d like to go, you can.”

She walked to the grave again, where the one funeral attendee that she had barely said a word to was sitting on the grass. “So you’re the famous Lucy?” Rhys Jones asked.

“It appears so, yes,” she replied carefully, lowering herself to the dewy ground beside him. 

“It’s what gave away that he was a spy, you know,” Rhys said, not looking at her.

“Really?”

He smiled ruefully, a joke that only he understood. “I overheard him tell a couple of blokes he was trying to befriend that he was single and had been jilted by a sweetheart, because the Nazis like to radicalise the bitter members of society. Then he gushed about you when we were alone.”

“I think the words you’re looking for are ‘terrible influence’, Mister Jones,” she joked weakly.

“One word for it, yes.” Rhys brushed some raindrops from the headstone. “God, he really did adore you.”

Her words suddenly seemed to swell up inside her throat, trapped there and affording her swallowed tears nowhere to go, forcing them from her eyes. “Oh…” She had cried a lot in recent times, more than she ever had in her life, but always alone. She shoved his hand from her shoulder and grasped the material of her coat in her fists.

“I’ll leave you alone,” Rhys said in a measured voice, getting to his feet, “Mrs Mountfitchet.”

Lucy closed her eyes. She had never confronted exactly how she felt for Felix, the depth of that connection and how long it would last. It hadn’t been necessary when he was alive at her side, flustered and laughing, or detailing his missions in weekly letters five pages long: the feeling was a given, something that she would never have to think about it because she would never be without it.

When he had left for Germany, he had swept her up in a warm embrace and kissed her cheek, and she had wished that she could capture the last ten seconds and replay them at another time to truly appreciate how fierce and handsome her husband was. That would have been a much more tearful, aching moment if she had known it was the last time she would see him alive. Without him, it was as if all the colour had dripped from the world, solidified into her memories, a kaleidoscope of colour turning over and over in her head. His last kiss, last smile, last ‘I love you’.

Daisy’s earlier question was still snaking through every corner of her mind, a hissing uncertainty. What would she do without him? Without Felix Mountfitchet, without her husband, without her closest friend?

Everything about her situation would be so much clearer if he was there to talk her through it, holding her hand and saying,  _ You can go on without me, Lucy dear. I know you can. _


End file.
